What is in my Backyard? A Dinosaur Mystery #dinosaur #paleontology

What genus? I put the answer at the bottom of this post. Welcome to another edition of what’d we find in a crate? Today Gunnar and I finally worked our way a specific crate assembled with a partition inside it, indicating those bones go together. The bones were numbered!!! Always a great thing as that lets us know how much we are missing. And makes assembly almost too easy :-). After some of the challenges we have faced, we’ll take easy! For those of you that don’t know, I received 27(!) crates 7’ x 4’ x 4’ with no manifest or content info. Numerous casts of dinosaurs, mammals, pterosaurs and more are in the crates. Individual casts are spread across numerous crates. We have two and three of some taxa. Some are complete, others are not. It is the ultimate puzzle!!! We have been diligently opening crates and identifying what is in them. We know what animals could be present, but that doesn’t mean they are. Delightfully, we have found numerous critters that weren’t supposed to be present, so each animal we carefully evaluate. When numbered, it makes it easy! Yet missing parts like the sacrum and most of the hind limbs can make things tough. As it turned out, we have the skull for this animal at my house. It would have made the pic much “cooler” and certainly easier to ID this genus at a glance. On this specimen we were able to identify which elements were cast from original material versus those that were manufactured for this mount. Very few dinosaur skeletons are complete, so the artisans creating the casts have to build missing elements. They start with sister taxa and other specimens of the same genus when possible. Then they look a little farther out phylogenetically if still in a pinch. If still at a loss? They use their knowledge of anatomy to make a best guess. Missing elements can be reconstructed by looking at, for example preserved vertebrae. They are typically predictable, so building missing elements for display is relatively easy. However, THAT is why it is so, so dangerous to study mounts. One needs to know exactly which bones are original, or were cast from original, vs which ones were created. The answer is: #Utahraptor 1st gen #FossilCrates #raptor #dinosaur #dinosaurs #dinosaurskeleton #dinosaurs🦖🦕 #Dinosaur🦖🦕 #prehistoric #prehistoricanimals #paleontology